Nexus 2017: Renaissance 2.0

“We’re entering a revolution right now,” founder of Nexus, Colin Cantrell, said, “and whether we like to say it or not, Who is John Galt?

“Things we’ve been imagining for a long time are coming to fruition. So what side of it are we going to be on? What are we going to do about it? Are we going to do it peacefully? Are we going to do it violently? Are we going to protest? Because protesting doesn’t work, does it? Just look at the ‘60s, it empowers your enemy.”

What we need, says Colin, is a simple shift of focus. To stop pouring energy in empowering the current system (mostly through cheering and jeering on the prefabbed bread and circuses) and make new rules to play by.

You know the old Bucky Fuller saying. To paraphrase: Build new systems which make the old systems feckless and impotent.

“We don’t need to get our shoes dirty, mucking around in the mud that somebody else made. We can just walk around it. Because we’ve got something better. The technology is here. It’s already been here, we just don’t realize we can all do it.”

A Pale Blue Dot

“We’re seeing the national debt quadrupling and going to ridiculous levels. And now they’re actually going to get rid of the debt ceiling because, of course, we’re living under a debt-based currency. Nobody reads the fine print: This note is legal tender for all debts public and private.”

Meanwhile, says Cantrell, “it costs $20,000 for a pencil and $5,000 for a hammer in Iraq.”

“That’s coming to an end. We’re seeing hyperinflation all over the world. We’re seeing the powers trying to start new wars. And now it’s very important for all of us to stay united.

“We’re just a pale blue dot, a small speck in a vast cosmic arena. And we need to preserve and cherish this pale blue dot, and we do that by preserving and cherishing one another.

“And through that, we continue to build…

Dark Ages. Dark Ages. Dark Ages. BOOM!

“You can take one hundred million bits of a Bitcoin, each bit called a Satoshi and you can program each Satoshi to be anything of value. It can represent titles to automobiles, real estate, diamonds, gold, votes in elections, barrels of oil, shipping containers, speakers, whatever you can think of. Anything of value can now be digitized and tokenized, put up on the blockchain, and transacted. It can be sent across the Internet without having to go through a trusted third-party.”

And who does this disrupt, exactly? Namely, “Those guys that stand in the middle who charge lots of fees,” says Weeks. “They have all the skyscrapers in all the major cities. If you go around the world… every major city in the world, the tallest buildings in the world are always the banks.”

Indeed. The SWIFT network shuffles through an estimated $8 trillion per day in cash and securities across 200 countries, through 10,800 financial institutions, which all take their ounces of flesh from the heap of tens of millions of transactions.

And there’s also this…

“Now do you understand why Satoshi Nakamoto doesn’t want anyone to know who he is?

“Think about it. The banking cartels have been financing both sides of wars and trying to conquer the world for 500 years! And here we are. It’s like the Renaissance with the printing press.

“Dark Ages. Dark Ages. Dark Ages. BOOM! IT’S THE PRINTING PRESS!

“It’s just like that with the blockchain.”

Renaissance 2.0?

It’s easy to underestimate (and, yes, overestimate) the power of technology to change the way we work, live, organize society, govern, communicate and view the world.

The Renaissance was a rising tide. Those who lived during that period saw an absolute explosion of technical and cognitive advancement, which benefited all it touched. And this progress was spurred by a radical idea: independent verification outside of the mouth of the Crown. As Colin put it:

“The last Renaissance is when they said, ‘Hey, we’re not going to listen to the Crown anymore. We’re going to independently verify each other with the scientific method. We’re going to put these facts out there, and allow other people to check those facts. That’ll determine the veracity of our argument.”

Now, something else, something similar in scope, has emerged.

“We see that we have a distributed system that cannot be altered, cannot be corrupted from a central point. We see that we cannot only just transfer value in a currency… we can develop trust with one another in a mathematical way because you cannot corrupt the fabrics of mathematics. Never. And the beauty of that is everybody can independently verify that.

“We don’t always make the right decisions, we make mistakes. We’re all human. That’s why we need to listen to one another, and let us be our own check and balances. Part of what’s so beautiful about blockchains is every node checks one another.”

So, he said, we have two choices: “We’re either going to destroy ourselves, or we’re going to have another Renaissance.